The Pure Cold Light (27 page)

Crouching, he tossed in the mask, then crawled painfully into the confines beside it and pulled the shower curtain closed.

The air in the box hung still and muggy upon him. The rain had imbued him with its chemical odor, vaguely sulphurous, and this mixed with the unwholesomeness of the box itself. He didn’t care: the place offered him invisibility, nonexistence.

Hunched forward, he stared at the moist floor between his legs, unable to order his thoughts, to make sense of anything. Memories spilled through the gaps in his synapses.

He grabbed the mask and clipped the collar together. It lit up, its beatific features collapsed and distorted, but at least the mesh was drying out. He stood it in the corner, where it focused on nothing, a manikin head that had just popped up out of the ground.

 
He shrugged out of his soggy coat and stripped off the pink shirt, placing them beside the mask. Taking the small blanket, he rolled it up into a makeshift pillow. Then he lay on his back against the cool plastic foam floor. Sweat gleamed on his torso. He sighed deeply.

The muscles of his belly were stretched tight as a drumhead. In the mask light, the skin of his upper arm looked swollen and dark. He tried to close his eyes for sleep but found that all he could see was Chikako Peat: the way her lavender eyes laughed at him, the way her body leapt as each shot kicked her.

He opened his eyes and stared into the blackness of the ceiling.

“She died because of me,” he said aloud. The words were dull in the box. He turned toward the forgiving maskface.

Where were the emotions Chikako had drawn from him? It felt like days but it had been only hours earlier. He remembered pleasure breaking loose inside him. It had no form, the pleasure—he couldn’t hold onto it any more than he could find grief within himself. The invasive
virtual
presence had dusted him with emotion and personality, but he’d used them up in his passion play. The bypass allowed no second sampling. He had to get the damned thing off if he ever hoped to vent all that unexplored, untapped emotion. If it was even there.

For the moment all he had inside himself was ice.

***

Mingo stood between two security officers wearing name tags that identified them respectively as Gus and Eddie. They perched on swivel seats, hunkered at separate consoles, and traded unhappy glances like two schoolboys under the baleful glare of a nasty, crabby pedagogue. They knew of Mingo by reputation only, but that was sufficient to ruin the rest of their shift.

He had made simple, if drastic, demands, and the two security officers were doing all they could to accommodate him. He wasn’t being any too helpful. In the first place he insisted they set aside their regular duties and instead devote themselves to tracking a single individual for him, this at a time of night when their normal work load fell off and all they wanted to do was stretch out, remove their boots and relax, smoke a little
kif
. When they asked him why they were to do this, he responded, “It’s important.”

He offered a rough description of the perpetrator he was hunting and they set to work, loading the characteristics he gave them into the system and hoping it would find a match immediately. The sooner they got rid of Mr. Mingo, the better. Disks whirred.
 

“What about
this
face, is this maybe him?” Gus asked time after time, and every time to no avail.

Hung strategically between and before the two men, a large screen displayed each face the system selected.

They looked at a close-up of a brown-skinned face. It was oblong, bald on top, with gray puffs of hair over each ear. Thought Gus, it certainly matched his description.

“No,” Mingo said with undisguised impatience, “he’s not
really
black. You’re not listening. It’s a mask.”

“Gray, you said gray, ya see,” Gus tried to explain, “and it’s factored that in.” He wished he knew the words for what the damn thing did, how it stored and accessed imagery. He wished he could have put Eddie in the hot seat instead of him, but Big Ed had the IQ of a belt buckle. Definitely not the person to appease someone with Mingo’s clout, not if the two of them wanted to keep their jobs.

“Gray is
relative
, a mere impression due to the LifeMask he’s wearing.”

“Well, then, what’s he really look like?” asked Eddie. Gus fearfully shook his head and interjected, “We can’t factor gray as an
impression
, sir.”

“What about LifeMasks in general? Let’s narrow it to those if your machines can make that distinction.” He walked over and glanced out the one-way glass, down a two-story drop to an enclosed patio where hundreds of bodies milled about. As if everything were fine, as if nobody in the room were under the slightest pressure. That calmness scared Gus more than anything.

“Ahm, sure, we can do that, I think,” he’d answered, “but there must be, I dunno—what you think, Eddie?” praying,
Please, Ed, don’t fuck up.

“Hunerts,” responded his partner.

“Yeah, must be hundreds of them.”

“How about,” Mingo said without turning from the window, “you factor in flight as well? A LifeMask fleeing. Running.”

“Well,
there
you go.” Gus typed.

Eddie meanwhile mumbled into a throat mike, communicating quietly with other security people who were trying to check in, telling them to call the shots on their own for the time being. Gus heard their heated responses, and cringed, assuming that Mingo heard them, too.

The screen offered face after face, spinning snapshots from the master disk, comparing each to the new parameters established, portraits whipping past in an ever-shifting mosaic. It suddenly delivered up a profile shot of a face leaning forward, the angle suggestive of a body running. It was a very dark black face, yet slightly luminous. Gus had his fingers crossed. Behind him, Mingo said triumphantly, “That’s him. Excellent work. Let’s track him.”

“Sneg it,” crowed Eddie, clapping his hands. He wore leather gloves without fingers.
 

Mingo said, “Does he ever speak comprehensibly?”

“Hey, that’s good—speak comprehensibly,” Gus replied with feigned appreciation. He launched the tracking program, then sat and watched the screen. His stomach felt as if it were being eaten away.

The program picked up the quarry a short distance from Grofé’s, followed him down various levels, caught him on an escalator, a ramp, and outdistancing a cyclecab. Mingo was leaning on the back of Gus’s chair. His fingers squeezed at the vinyl, producing a creaky sound that raised goose bumps on Gus.

The final image was of the individual in the mask leaving from the Penn Tower Three exit.

“He’s got out, into the Undercity. That’s that.”

“What do you mean, ‘that’s that’? Switch to external.”

“You want to follow him
outside
, too?”

Mingo gritted his teeth. “I want to follow him if he goes to
Neptune
.”

So they had switched monitoring systems. The exterior of Penn Three came up on the screen. The time codes raced to match up.

Soon enough, they were watching Angel Rueda cross an open plaza and head toward City Hall. Another lens system, on the far side, another time code matchup, and there was a shot of him passing the Market Street checkpoint with all of its food kiosks. Far along the side street they could seea brightly painted Chinese arch. They watched their prey wander toward it until the rain washed his image into the shadows.

“That’s the last of it.”

Mingo sighed. “Look, I happen to know there’s a whole system of monitors strung throughout the Undercity. Don’t try to get out of this. I can have your asses dropped off the globe if I want to. Now access that system.”

The color drained from Gus’s face as he considered how to express what he had to say next and still live. “I’ll connect up if you want, but I got to tell you, Mr. Mingo, that system’s been all but a total bust for years. We put in our microcams, they find ’em and rip them out and sell ’em or barter ’em. We got a few teahouses covered still, maybe two, three blocks of the ’Namese quarter around Box City. The rest they located and removed. They took a whole fistful of microcams from along the Delaware and ringed the underside of a toilet seat with ’em without destroying the transmitters. We still don’t know where the goddamn toilet is, but I can show you it’s still in use if you’re interested. They make a big deal of it, probably charging admission to shit on the Overcity. You get what I mean, sir? And it’s the same, lots of places outside the walls, too, especially west of town, what with everything bein’ burned out. Some places ya need an armed escort, which is the same as painting a sign on it. Not worth the trouble to replace the things.”

“I see. Seems I’ll have to squeeze a few people. I’d no idea Undercity security had gone to the dogs. Thank you for explaining, Gus.” He dropped down on the couch, all the steam taken out of him. His leg was absolutely throbbing. He needed to take another painblocker. “What do I do now?” he asked.

Gus replied, “Now you hope he needs to get laid or smoke some ‘O’ in the right teahouse.”

“Or else,” noted Mingo, “makes use of the only optically equipped toilet seat in the city.”

“You got it, sir.”

“Tremendous.”

Chapter Nineteen: Box City

Asleep in the box, he lightly kissed memory’s lips. It was his first dream.

Figures in gray hoods and business suits pursued him through a dark, airless landscape that manifested slowly, creeping into view, until it became a distorted image of Philadelphia, its towers like candle wax, burning down; beside the trash- surfaced roadway, he ran past a headless torso that had limbs formed of metal coils and which droned “Yawp, yawp, yawp,” through a plastic larynx atop its stubby neck. The sight of it dogged him until he was running blindly to escape. He dashed into a gloomy enclosure and only stopped when he banged his shins against a projecting pipe—only, it wasn’t a pipe at all, it was a large cylinder with lines and glyphs etched into it. It had a dirty glass portal in it just below him through which he saw Chikako Peat, stretched out naked inside. He wiped at the grime on the glass and, as it cleared, the face underneath became Thomasina Lyell’s. For some reason the metamorphosis didn’t surprise him. The cylinder retreated from him suddenly, and he discovered that it was attached to a mechanism in the shadows. It moved like a shell sliding into the chamber of a cannon, loading as he looked on, ejecting an instant later, pistonlike, empty. The body—whose?—had been launched through a network of colorful tubes, none of which had existed a moment before. He followed them to a crack in the wall and peered out. The tubes snaked across the ground, finally gathered together and connected to the yawping torso outside. Even when he couldn’t see it, the voice of the thing continued to bark with clockwork regularity. He knew, if he stayed there long enough, a head would sprout on the body. Already it had begun to develop breasts, take on sexual characteristics, the identity of which he knew because he could see the emerging hexagram on its thigh. As if aware of his attention, the thing rose up on one foot, balanced deftly, hands poised, an idol, an icon, a more than human terminal. Its cranium slowly bulged into place, the tubes and cables loose and writhing in a hypnotic dance, a celebration; he swung away in horror, not wanting to see but more specifically not wishing to
be
seen by her, and startled himself, realizing he had no idea what
he
looked like, what sex
he
was … while the arms of metal coils glided in through the cracked wall and spun around and around him, mummifying, sealing out light and air, gathering about him in a whirlpool of nullity, the same seething cyclone the
virtual
program had become. Its magnetism seized and dragged him into the hungry vortex.

He awoke, glued by his sweat to the plastic foam. His curtain hung closed; the air encased him wetly. It was still dark outside. He sat up, blinking back tears. His head brushed the ceiling. He wiped at his cheek, wondering vaguely why he could react to events only in his sleep.

His arm, still warm, had lost some of its ache; the swelling seemed to have gone down, he couldn’t be sure. He was so hot and grimy in that oven of a box, he couldn’t tell if he had a fever or not.

Drawing back the Odie curtain, he skooched up till he could peer down the lane.

From the left, an unsavory breeze flowed along; it enveloped him, cooled him where he sat. He could see others seated in their boxes. They might have been duplicates of him. He thought,
This is what we all are underneath.
 

 
What that meant, where the singular observation came from, he didn’t know.

After awhile, he shook out his shirt and put it on. He got to his feet stiffly, but had to hold his jacket in his teeth while he clumsily tucked the shirt into his pants. Lifting the coat, he could only stare at it, unable to identify it as his own. It wasn’t, of course, it was Gansevoort’s.

In the dream, he had been wearing something blue…

Already the specifics of the nightmare blurred. Angel had no long- term memory in which to house dreams. They fell like coins through a torn pocket.

He folded the humid jacket over his bad arm and then, turning slowly in a circle, surveyed the encampment.

The rain had stopped, but few heads showed above the boxes. Bright lights still glared on top of the Vine Street wall. Machinery still shook the ground: the unloading of supplies for the city continued around the clock.

He drew a deep breath, then began to cough. Sparkles danced before his eyes for a second; he tested his lungs more carefully.

Over the quadrangle, streamers of smoke rose languidly into the sky. What did they use for fuel? Old clothes? Worn out boxes? The umbrella-woman had warned about lighting fires; but weren’t packing crates like these supposed to be fireproof? He thought he might once have known the answer to that question.

He was feeling hungry again. It would be good to eat something.

He dug around in the jacket for items to trade for food, and found the two cubes and a gold cigarette case. The case had been Chikako’s. He remembered. He turned it over, opened it. It was empty. Holding it close, he sniffed its herbal odor, and triggered an explosive memory of her. Her face, eyes, lips lit up the sky. He had to lean against the top of the box—his legs couldn’t hold him. He squeezed his eyes shut to blot out the vision, and closed the case, fumblingly tucking it away before it could do more harm. Before it could batter him with his own emotions again.